King Arthur Pendragon

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

And So It Begins...

Recently I was totally uninspired to run my usual Friday night's session to my players. Try as I might, I could not come up with anything to dazzle my players with. We were starting a new campaign of a shall-remain-unnamed system and I had writer's block. Not even the pre-written adventures sparked my imagination. Not wanting to leave my players frustrated once more (we already had too many nights spent creating characters and discussing potential campaigns), I turned to my old D&D red box (the Mentzer edition). When I announced, that Friday, that we would be rolling new characters and immediately start playing in a dungeon, there were amused giggles and gasps of shock. But I persevered and rolled we did.

In less than thirty minutes, my players were stomping their way through the ruins of King Gygar's castle which is the sample adventure in the Dungeon Masters Rulebook. And you know what? We had a lot of fun letting ourselves get sucked into this world of fantasy, just exploring a dungeon (even if we only made it to the front door) with no setting and using a lighter set of rules. My players showed lots of creativity dealing with that pesky carrion crawler and even managed to kill three kobolds and frighten two more before the opposition forced them to return to town for a much needed rest. And in that moment, something struck me like a lightning. This was the most fun session I had played for quite a few months (it didn't help that we spent the last months in a few abortive campaigns using other non-fantasy systems as everyone was tired of rolling characters and just wanted to play).

I always considered myself as a D&D geek if only in name, but here was my opportunity to turn my geekiness factor up to 11. And the players wanted more, too. And so it begins my journey into the worlds of D&D (and AD&D) of yore. This is a blog about this new - and hopefully exciting journey - of a long-time player who never played D&D and his mad group of followers. I hope you find it as interesting a reading as I have fun writing it.